2010 CASIOPA Workshop on Economic Valuation of Protected Areas

Following up from the 2009 CASIOPA webinar on general Human Dimensions, this workshop focused on the various techniques that have been used to yield economic valuations for natural or protected areas. Will WIstowsky of OMNR was the driving force behind this workshop – thanks Will!

We learned how to accomplish economic valuations and presenters showed case studies of where this has been used, and what the criticisms of such analyses are.

The meeting keyed in on the existence values – “Out of Site but Not Out of Mind”: the relative importance of protected areas to non-visitors.

This was primarily an e-conference but we were pleased to welcome leading edge presenters from around the world!

Will Wistowsky, Eric Miller & Peter Masson (Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources) started us off with a discussion of how OMNR performs economic valuation of protected areas and how it would like to expand.

We then focused on Challenges and opportunities for using ecosystem service valuation in protected areas management. We were joined for this talk by Austin Troy, Shelley Cole, Dave Saah, and Matthew Wilson (University of Vermont [AT], Spatial Informatics Group LLC [SC & DS], & CH2M [MW])

Stephen McCanny (Parks Canada) followed up his excellent 2009 CASIOPA talk (on Human Dimensions) with a further discussion of how economic valuation can dovetail with ecological research – focusing on some case examples.

Vinay Kanetkar (University of Guelph) spoke on “Conjoint and discrete choice designs for managing paradoxes”. The biggest challenge is to understand what we are asking people to do trade-offs in terms of parks and protected areas (interesting one thing that is sometimes lacking in protected area surveys is to ask a subject if they even care about the questions).

Our plenary speaker was Vic Adamowicz (University of Alberta) who cogently showed us the complexity and yet the clarity that can be gained with valuation; his topic was Environmental Valuation – Principles, Priorities and Perils

The webinar worked well overall (one is always a bit trepidatious) and the 80 attendees repaired after the meeting for some further discussions.